EXTREME TRIVIA
Trivia
The name is a joke about the band they stopped being. Songfacts' Artistfacts entry records that the Boston group Gary Cherone fronted was called The Dream, and that it had only just renamed itself Extreme when Nuno Bettencourt and Pat Badger came in. The entry reads the spelling as a pun on "ex-Dream."
"More Than Words," the song that took them to No.1 in the US, arrived in about the time it takes to sit down on a porch with a guitar. Speaking to Songfacts, Nuno Bettencourt said the whole thing came at once inside five to fifteen minutes, and that he carried it straight indoors to Gary Cherone so they could build the lyric around it. He added that he simply stops work on a song that does not come quickly — in his experience the good ones always do.
On 20 April 1992 Extreme went on second, after Metallica, at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in London. Songfacts records that they played a medley of Queen songs plus "More Than Words," and that Gary Cherone came back later to sing "Hammer To Fall" alongside Tony Iommi and the three surviving members of Queen. By Cherone's own account the invitation came over dinner with Brian May. The band were in the middle of recording III Sides to Every Story at the time; they went straight back to the studio, pulled out their Queen CDs, and he and Nuno Bettencourt worked the medley up from there. He calls the day the pinnacle for Extreme.
Eddie Van Halen turned up unannounced at Nuno Bettencourt's door on the very day he was cutting that "Rise" solo. Speaking on SiriusXM's Hair Nation, in an account reported by Loudwire, Bettencourt explained that he shuts the world out while recording and was ignoring a run of calls from Gary Cherone that afternoon. He gave in when the texts insisted he come down to the front of the house, opened the door ready to complain, and found Eddie standing there. Eddie asked to hear the new album; Bettencourt wanted to finish it first and said he would play it for him later, and Eddie said he would come back. He never did. Bettencourt puts the visit at around 2019 and says he still regrets not playing it for him.
Victor Entertainment's product page shows the Japanese edition of Six running to thirteen tracks. The album proper ends at track twelve, "Here's To The Losers," and the Japan-only bonus track, the radio edit of "Rise," follows it at thirteen. The edition also does what Japanese releases traditionally do with a foreign title: every song, and the album itself, is listed with a katakana rendering beside the English name.
The Japanese edition of Six went on sale on 7 June 2023, ahead of the rest of the world. Gekirock reported it as a Japan-first release carrying a bonus track — the radio edit of the single "Rise." Victor Entertainment issued it as VICP-65611 at ¥2,970 including tax. The same report noted a T-shirt bundle sold only through the Victor Online Store, with a postcard signed by every member of the band going to the earliest buyers.
On their April 2012 visit to Japan, Extreme played Pornograffitti from beginning to end. BARKS announced it as their first Japanese tour in four years and presented the complete performance of the album as something the band had not attempted before. The shows were two nights at Tokyo Dome City Hall plus Namba Hatch in Osaka, with Nuno Bettencourt, Gary Cherone, Pat Badger and Kevin Figueiredo.
The autumn 2023 run, EXTREME THICKER THAN BLOOD TOUR 2023, was the band's first Japanese tour in about seven years. It was announced as five shows in five cities, from SENDAI GIGS on 17 September to Zepp Namba in Osaka on the 26th, then grew to seven as dates were added at Showa Women's University Hitomi Memorial Hall and at Zepp Haneda, both in Tokyo. By June, BARKS reported, all three of the Kanto-area shows had already sold out.
Between forming in 1985 and releasing Six, Extreme have put out only six studio albums. Nuno Bettencourt gave his reason for that to the Australian magazine Heavy, in an interview relayed by BARKS: if they are going to release a record there has to be a reason, and the reason has to be that they have made something worth sharing. He said he told Gary Cherone when they were very young that he would not put music out simply for the sake of putting it out. He concedes it is not the financially smart choice — albums bring tours and tours bring money — but he will not release anything he is not genuinely proud of.
Six, the album that ended a fifteen-year gap, was recorded at Nuno Bettencourt's home studio in Los Angeles. In his own words on the band's site, what set the tone for it was Eddie Van Halen's death: he is not the one who takes that throne, he says, but he felt a responsibility to keep guitar playing alive, and that is why there is so much fire on the record. Gary Cherone puts the same attitude another way — they are not in competition with anybody else, only with themselves.
"Hurricane," on Six, was written about a real person. On the band's own site Nuno Bettencourt explains that it is about a close friend, John Martin, who died in a motorcycle accident while they were out on tour. Losing someone crushes you, he says; time passes and it settles, but the pain does not go away. Gary Cherone points to the same song as proof that the man everyone treats as a guitar hero is a songwriter first, and says there was never any question of leaving it off.
How far "More Than Words" travelled is spelled out in numbers on the band's own site: over half a billion streams and 633 million YouTube views, which keeps it among the most-played rock songs there are. It appeared in the comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and on The Tonight Show Jimmy Fallon and Jack Black not only covered it but restaged the iconic video. Covers range from The Piano Guys to Frankie J. The same page notes that Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, Brian May of Queen and John Mayer have all praised the band in public.
Nuno Bettencourt hedges nicely about Six on the band's own site: whatever you think an Extreme album is after two or three songs, it is not — true fans, he says, know to expect the unexpected — and on that basis he calls this one Extreme 2.0. Gary Cherone stresses instead how well the record hangs together as a whole. Of the closing "Here's To The Losers," Cherone says it is as close to an anthem as they will get, with tongue firmly in cheek. The same page puts the band's sales at ten million records and their Spotify audience at an average of over five million monthly listeners.
A different explanation sits on Songfacts' own interview page with Nuno Bettencourt. There the sidebar says the band picked the name because the music they drew on ranged so widely — from Prince to Led Zeppelin. Nothing we opened settles which account is right, so both stay here. The same sidebar notes that the X Games spent their first year, 1995, under the name the Extreme Games.
The first door to open for them was not a label but a local TV channel. In 1985 Gary Cherone, Paul Geary, Hal Lebeaux, Peter Hunt and Paul Mangone were playing "Mutha (Don't Wanna Go To School Today)" around Boston as The Dream. The city happened to have V66, a UHF station given over to music videos, so they shot a clip with family and friends as the cast and sent it in; it got plenty of airtime. The same tape went to MTV's Basement Tapes, a showcase for unsigned acts decided by viewer vote, and won it. That one clip is what put them in front of a national audience.
The line-up that still stands took another year. Songfacts records that in 1986 Nuno Bettencourt came in on guitar in place of Hal Lebeaux and Peter Hunt, and that Pat Badger replaced Paul Mangone on bass. They kept working the Boston clubs until A&M Records signed them in 1987, and the self-titled debut followed in 1989 with "Mutha" — the song that started it all — on the track list. As a single it drew less attention than "Play With Me" and "Kid Ego."
Extreme are a Boston band, but Nuno Bettencourt was born in Portugal; Songfacts' Artistfacts entry says he moved there at the age of four. The band's own site leans on the same connection, calling them a Beantown quartet, and lists among their milestones a sold-out show at Fenway Park opening for Aerosmith.
The videos for "More Than Words" and "Hole Hearted" were both shot by the married directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who would go on to make the film Little Miss Sunshine in 2006. The "More Than Words" clip was kept deliberately plain and black-and-white so that nothing competed with the song, and it shows only Nuno Bettencourt and Gary Cherone, seated, in a studio. A good many viewers concluded from it that Extreme were a duo. They were a four-piece.
Nuno Bettencourt volunteered the origin of the follow-up hit, "Hole Hearted," to Songfacts himself. The album was all but finished when his first ever twelve-string arrived at the studio, and the opening chords were the first thing he played on it out of the box. He then says he wrote the song on the toilet: excitement over the new guitar sent him there, he sat down, and the ideas came out instead. He was listening to Led Zeppelin III constantly at the time and says he borrowed some of that acoustic feel.
The voice answering Gary Cherone across "Get The Funk Out" belongs to the Canadian guitarist Pat Travers — singing, not playing guitar, though he does turn up on fretless bass elsewhere on Pornograffitti, on "Song For Love." The horns that drive the track were arranged by Randy Badazz, a nephew of Herb Alpert, and are credited as the "L'il Jack Horn Section," a name borrowed from the other song on the album they appear on, "Li'l Jack Horny."
The long guitar introduction to "He-Man Woman Hater" on Pornograffitti is not played by Nuno Bettencourt at all. It is Dweezil Zappa, Frank Zappa's son. The section carries a title of its own, "Flight Of The Wounded Bumble Bee," and is built on the classical piece "Flight Of The Bumblebee." The song title itself comes from the He-Man Woman Haters Club of The Little Rascals.
Pornograffitti was not designed as a suite; it drifted into being a loose concept record while Gary Cherone was writing it, as he told Songfacts. "Decadence Dance" works as the overture and sets out the theme — a boy leaving home, meeting a decadent world and losing his innocence. That is why it opens on a mother shouting "Francis, be careful!": Francis is the boy. By the time the record reaches "He-Man Woman Hater" near the end, he is trying to square what he did on the road with the woman he actually loved and pushed away.
The two songs the band is now known for were the ones the label reached for last. Pornograffitti led with "Decadence Dance," which went nowhere, and followed it with "Get The Funk Out," which did no better. The third single was the acoustic ballad "More Than Words," and that one went to No.1 in the US, with "Hole Hearted" following it up the chart. Extreme's own site puts "Hole Hearted" at No.4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the album in the Billboard 200's top ten, double platinum in time. The gap between what the band sounded like and what people knew them for starts with that running order.
III Sides to Every Story is built in three parts — "Yours," "Mine" and "The Truth" — and the last of them is Everything Under The Sun, an orchestral suite running about twenty-two minutes. Songfacts reports that a seventy-piece orchestra was used for it and that the section was recorded at Abbey Road in London. The suite is made up of "Rise 'n Shine," "Am I Ever Gonna Change?" and "Who Cares?" The Latin spoken about four minutes into "Am I Ever Gonna Change?" is the absolution a Catholic priest gives at the end of a confession; the album's liner notes credit the voice to Dr. Edward de R. Cayia.
Four peacemakers stand behind "Peacemaker Die." Gary Cherone told Songfacts that each stanza of the song's two verses points at one of them: Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and — through the line about being the one with the gun — John Lennon. The track uses part of King's "I Have A Dream" speech, and the permission for it came from a phone call Cherone made himself to Martin Luther King III. King's son worried the title would be read as a call to kill peacemakers, so there was some discussion before he gave his blessing. Clearances like that are rare: Songfacts notes that Living Colour were refused when they wanted the speech for "Cult of Personality."
"Rest in Peace" was written during the Gulf War. Nuno Bettencourt told Songfacts that he had been watching people outside the White House holding up signs reading MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR, and that the song started from the thought that war is not that simple — nobody wants one until someone is invading their country. The band do not love war, he said; they just did not think the slogan settled the matter. As for the riff, he admits he made no attempt to hide the nod to Jimi Hendrix.
While Extreme were out of action, Gary Cherone fronted Van Halen from 1996 to 1999, a stretch that produced one album, Van Halen III. Its "How Many Say I" is the only Van Halen song Eddie Van Halen sang lead on, and Cherone told Songfacts how that came about. Eddie read a lyric over his shoulder that Cherone had been working on for a few days, asked whether he could take it, and by the next morning had it worked out at the piano as a rough demo. Eddie was reluctant to sing it on the record; the person who talked him into it was Cherone.
When "Rise" arrived in 2023 as Extreme's first new song in fifteen years, what took over the conversation was not the song but Nuno Bettencourt's guitar solo. As Louder reported, Guitar World called it one of the greatest solos of the 21st century, and the YouTuber Rick Beato warned — approvingly — that trying to master it might leave you with tendonitis. Brian May, Justin Hawkins, Toto's Steve Lukather and Def Leppard's Phil Collen all praised it, and guitarists everywhere wrecked their fingers trying to copy it. Bettencourt's own reading is the opposite. He told Classic Rock that he has been playing decent solos for nearly forty years, so the reaction had to be about more than this one; what he had told his manager he wanted from the album was to bring the guitar back in a way that was joyful and exciting rather than merely technical.
"Play With Me," from the debut album, opens on a souped-up run at Mozart's Turkish March. The song turned up in the 1989 film Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, in the scene where Mozart lands in the present and plays a keyboard in a shopping-mall music store, and again in the opening episode of season four of Netflix's Stranger Things. As Songfacts points out, that second one is an anachronism: the season is set in 1986 and the song was not released until 1989. Bettencourt has said the groove came from Kix, a band he was listening to constantly at the time.
Nuno Bettencourt found out how far Extreme's songs had travelled at a Grammy Awards soundcheck. As he told Songfacts, Ed Sheeran came over to say hello and mentioned that the second song he ever learned on guitar was an Extreme one. Bettencourt assumed it would be "More Than Words." The answer was "Cupid's Dead." Sheeran then went and played it, John Mayer was on stage, and for a moment everyone in the room was playing "Cupid's Dead."
Nuno Bettencourt has been Rihanna's touring guitarist since 2009. He told Songfacts that his first response to the offer was to point out there was barely any guitar in her material, and that the answer came back that this was exactly the point — they wanted the live show to rock a little harder. What he enjoys is being able to use the same rig and play the same way he does in Extreme. The job put him on stage next to Paul McCartney at the Grammys, with two or three days of rehearsal to pick his brain, and in her band at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2023.
The one chair that kept changing was behind the kit. The dates in Songfacts' Artistfacts entry give Paul Geary 1985 to 1994, Mike Mangini 1994 to 1996, and Kevin Figueiredo from 2007 onward, after the band restarted. Gary Cherone on vocals, Nuno Bettencourt on guitar and Pat Badger on bass have been constant across both stretches, 1985 to 1996 and 2007 to the present.
"Hole Hearted" has always been heard as a break-up song, but according to Songfacts the person who can fill the hole in the singer's heart is not a woman. It is God. Gary Cherone is a devout Christian who kept that out of the foreground when writing rock lyrics; speaking to Christian publications he was open about his beliefs, and he once joked that he had plagiarised some of this song's words from the Bible.
Waiting for the Punchline, from 1995, opens with "There Is No God." Despite the title it is not a song against God, as Songfacts explains. Speaking to the Christian music magazine Heaven's Metal, Gary Cherone said the song sets religion against science and dwells on what the two have in common: both ask you to make a leap. He counts himself glad to be the one asked to make that leap towards God. As for where the title came from, he does not claim to know, guessing only that it echoes a magazine headline.
"Rock A Bye Bye," from the debut album, was written from an anti-abortion position in line with Gary Cherone's faith. Title and lyric both play on the lullaby "Rockabye Baby," turned to something far harsher. The first half of the song is orchestral; it drops into silence and then resumes with an extended guitar solo from Nuno Bettencourt. Songfacts adds that songs taking on subjects this contentious are the exception in Extreme's catalogue.
"Song For Love" was released as a single from Pornograffitti in Europe and reached No.12 in the UK. Songfacts follows that fact straight on with another: two years later Brian May of Queen invited the band to Wembley Stadium, where they became a major part of the Freddie Mercury tribute concert. The foothold outside America came first. The song itself starts quietly and builds, closing on a solo from Nuno Bettencourt.
"Rise" was written as a cautionary tale about the rise and fall of fame. Gary Cherone told Songfacts it is about the pitfalls that come with getting what you wished for. The chorus sounds uplifting — it promises to lift you up — until the third line adds that it will raise you up and then tear you apart, and Cherone says he enjoys watching new listeners' reaction videos snag on exactly that line. The band had circled the same theme before, in "Hip Today" in 1995 and "Star" in 2008. Nuno Bettencourt produced the track and directed its video.
Songwriting in Extreme has always run through Gary Cherone and Nuno Bettencourt, but since the band restarted in 2007 outside writers turn up from time to time. On Six the singer-songwriter Jordan Ferreira has credits on four songs, the lead single "Rise" among them. Cherone told Songfacts that he and Bettencourt began writing separately and with other people around the time the band split in 1995-96. Between the two of them, though, little has changed: usually a guitar part comes first, and if it moves him he writes a lyric to it.
"Banshee" takes its title from Irish folklore, where the banshee shrieks in the night to warn that death is coming and is usually pictured as a woman with long, flowing hair. Gary Cherone describes the song as a testament to the power and spirit of the female form. It was written by Bettencourt and Cherone with bassist Pat Badger — the only track on Six that carries a writing credit for Badger. Nuno Bettencourt co-directed the video with Rene Rigal.
The hash mark in front of "#Rebel" is doing work. Gary Cherone wrote the song as an answer to people who take others to task without having achieved anything themselves — hashtag rebels, as he calls them. He knows the territory. Extreme took criticism when their ballads made the band easy to misread, but that was nothing beside the reaction to his joining Van Halen: as Songfacts puts it, fans split into Dave and Sammy camps found common ground in their contempt for Cherone, and the internet had just given them somewhere to share it. Nuno Bettencourt co-directed the video.
"Other Side Of The Rainbow" picks up the thought Dorothy has in The Wizard Of Oz and turns it outward: Gary Cherone's lyric invites a woman who has been hurt to come and see what is on the other side, and to trust love again. Nuno Bettencourt plays the song acoustically before switching to electric for the solo, which he describes as his reading of a rainbow in sound. He has called it his favourite solo on the album. He co-directed the video with Rene Rigal.
The title "Thicker Than Blood" inverts the old saying that blood is thicker than water. Where the original insists that family ties outrank everything, the song proposes that love can outreach even kinship. Gary Cherone describes it as a critique of tribalism, with love as the way past it: in times of fear and anxiety people retreat into their tribes, and loving the neighbour or the stranger gets harder. He told Songfacts that while the song reads as topical against today's political divisions, he tries to write generally enough that it will still hold in ten or twenty years.
Kevin Antunes, who shares the writing credit on "Thicker Than Blood," is a keyboard player whose working life has been spent as a musical director, audio producer and mix engineer. The names Songfacts lists on his résumé run from New Kids On The Block, Britney Spears and 'N Sync to Madonna, Justin Timberlake and Cirque du Soleil. This one song is his only contribution to Six, an album Nuno Bettencourt produced with the band holed up in his home studio in Los Angeles.
The fifteen years before Six were not planned as fifteen years. Speaking to the Australian magazine Heavy in May 2018, in an interview relayed by BARKS, Nuno Bettencourt said there should have been another two or three albums by then and that the band themselves were disappointed there were not. He had twenty to twenty-five songs close to finished, he said, and his goal was to get a record out by that autumn. The album that eventually arrived, Six, came five years after that, in 2023. In the same interview he mentioned the eight to ten years the band spent not playing at all, and said what keeps him going is the passion he sees in the audience.
Of A&M Records, the label that signed Extreme in 1987, Nuno Bettencourt says it was set up by musicians for musicians. Talking to Louder after the death of co-founder Jerry Moss in 2023, he said nobody welcomed the band more warmly than the A and the M themselves — Moss and Herb Alpert. He remembers a message arriving from Alpert one day: he had a room, did Nuno want to jam? Bettencourt turned up, Alpert had his trumpet, they set up a drum machine and simply played. As it happens, the man who arranged the horns on Pornograffitti, Randy Badazz, is Alpert's nephew.
Nuno Bettencourt had to cancel a festival appearance during 2023, and the reason was basketball. As he explained to Louder, the band never do anything like that before a show, but Gary Cherone dragged him onto the court for what was supposed to be ten minutes. Coming down from a shot, trying not to land on another player, his knee went — he tore the ACL, the meniscus and the MCL at once. He looks back on the whole thing as a genuinely stupid idea.
For Nuno Bettencourt, 2023 was the year Six reached the UK album chart's top thirty and he stood on the Super Bowl stage in Rihanna's band. It also contained something he would rather forget. In the course of talking about that gig he posted that Slash could not have done it, and ended up in a public argument with Guns N' Roses guitarist Richard Fortus. He told Louder that he regretted it the instant he lifted his finger off the send button, that he put up a video the next day admitting he had been immature, and that since Fortus was only defending his bandmate, he owes him an apology too.
Eddie Van Halen stayed and talked a while at the door. In the account Loudwire relayed, he told Nuno Bettencourt about the planned "kitchen sink" tour, which had involved bringing Michael Anthony back, and about the work his son Wolfgang was doing on the Mammoth WVH solo album. Mid-conversation a car came round the narrow road, skidded to a stop, and the driver got out, saw the two of them and bowed — then left without asking for a photograph or an autograph. Bettencourt is fairly sure it was meant for Eddie rather than for him.